Talk:Mehlis/@comment-72.241.156.108-20160718231631/@comment-28059753-20160719042914
Attack speed is kind of wild west in this game, so it is difficult to tell what was intended sometimes. Best I can tell, "Aria of Speed" reduces attack time by ~10% while "Attack Speed Increase" reduces attack time by ~15%. Both reduce the time it takes to between the attack animation starting and the projectile being launched, but "Aria of Speed" seems to have a bigger effect on this value (especially for Shiho). I'll provide a bit more background. When a unit is attacking, it spends part of the time in an attack animation, then part of the time back in the normal standing animation. This second period is referred to by the translators as "cooldown". Cooldown is determined by the character's class, and is sometimes modified by skills. Different class evolution levels can have different cooldowns. The length of the attack animation is determined by the game's animation data on a character-by-character basis. Some characters have an alternate attack animation (at certain class-evolution levels) that might come into play during skill activation and may have a different length. Overall attack time is a combination of both of these periods. Since the attack animation is on a character-by-character basis, and furthermore separate for each class evolution level, the game system doesn't really enforce any consistency between characters for this data. Generally, the overall attack speed for each class will be the same, but there are exceptions here, like elves having faster attack animations. In some sense, abilities like "Attack Speed Up" don't actually affect how the game works -- these characters just have faster attack animations after AW, and the ability just serves as a marker. The 10% and 15% values I gave above consider both the attack animation and cooldown periods together. Since the ratio of attack animation length to cooldown varies from class to class, the same ability may need a greater or lesser effect on the length of the attack animation to give a consistent overall value. Lastly, I'll try to explain the point at which the projectile is launched (or for non-ranged melee units, this is equivalent to the point at which damage is dealt). The projectile is launched at the start of one of the attack animation frames. The number of the frame is the same for each unit of the same class (with different class evolution levels treated separately again). However, the timing of the frames (and sometimes even the number of total frames) again varies from unit to unit with the class evolution data. This way this is implemented gives an artistic restriction on the projectile timing. For example, Mages launch their projectile on the second animation frame, so artists can't add another animation frame that happens before the projectile launches. (Syncing of the projectile launch with the animation would be an artistic concern.) So, it is natural that if the overall animation is shorter, each animation frame will come sooner, and indeed this is the case so far as I've seen. I guess the cherry on top is that since animations are again separate for each character, the projectile timing doesn't have to be consistent between each character (although it generally is). Mehlis herself actually has a faster projectile timing than other Mages even before awakening -- 31 frames vs 41 which is further reduced to 21 after AW (the way I measure things). P.S. You can see overall attack speeds for all units on the wiki here. (I need to get around to making this into a separate page with more details.)